“Some days.” He took another drink of his wine as he glanced around at the Ice Knights memorabilia on the walls. “You know, we have a company suite at the Ice Knights arena. Maybe we can go sometime. Just not when they’re playing the Cajun Rage. My cousin is a Rage fan, and he is unbearable during those games—even with Fiona shooting death glares at him that would make a normal man’s balls explode.”

“I take it she roots for the correct team?” Chelle asked with a chuckle.

Nash’s blue eyes rounded comically. “Oh yeah, her family is pretty rabid—not to mention her brother-in-law is Zach Blackburn.”

She lifted her wineglass in a toast. “To opposites attracting.”

He tapped her glass with his, and after that they sat there, hip to hip, tucked into the narrow booth, and watched people in the bar as they flirted and gossiped and relaxed with friends. As a writer, observing folks was part of her daily existence. It made sense that someone whose job focused solely on how to get people to want things they didn’t realize they needed in their lives would be as into people watching as she was. At that moment Nash nudged her and jerked his chin toward an older couple sharing a bottle in the corner, holding hands on the tiny table between them.

“Actually spies tracking down an international wine thief,” he said.

Oh yeah, this was a game she could play.

“That guy in the gray plaid scarf is the number-one suspect,” she said, looking in the direction of the guy with the floppy hair, sitting by himself at the end of the bar.

Nash stretched, and his arm came down across the back of the booth, casually curling around her shoulders and setting her pulse to ultra-aware mode. It was like being enveloped by a thick, knit blanket, soft and solid at the same time. And very, very warm.

“Of course,” he said as he took another drink of his wine, “it could also be the woman over there in the head-to-toe black. She looks like she could kill a man with only her thumbs.”

Chelle laughed out loud. She couldn’t help it. He was right, the woman with a bunch of friends at one of the tables totally had the look of a well-trained assassin. “That’s Ryder Falcon, and she probably could take someone out with only her thumbs. She and her brother Tony own this investigative firm I’ve used a few times.”

She left off the part about using it to check him out before she agreed to get real married to a fake husband.

“Called it,” Nash said and clinked her glass with his.